Tom Hooper (2010)
The word ‘impediment’ for me means George VI. My grandmother used to talk about the late king in a respectful, regretful tone – ‘He had an impediment, poor man’. As I didn’t know the word (I was eight or nine at the time), I was fascinated by it. This memory attracted me to The King’s Speech when I first read about it but I was feeling different by the time I sat down in the Richmond Filmhouse last Sunday. ‘A right royal success!’ (The Daily Mail): the heart sinks. And the Filmhouse, excellent in many ways, isn’t the best place to watch this kind of thing. It was, of course, a full house (I was lucky – just about the only vacant seat was the one on my immediate left) and the Screen Salon preceding the show we went to unsurprisingly overran. ‘We shouldn’t be expected to put up with this,’ said one of the elderly Richmondians in the jam-packed foyer. ‘Oh, the British will put up with anything’, her companion replied. Including rude old bags like them, who ignore the queue. ‘We would have been better off at the Odeon’, sighed a French woman, anxious to deny the home side a monopoly on censorious whingeing but hard to disagree with. At least she probably sees more films than the battleaxes: I bet they only go to something starring members of the British acting aristocracy – and when these aristocrats are playing royals (Victoria or later) filmgoing becomes a patriotic duty. One thing that put me on the side of the people behind The King’s Speech as I watched it was their smuggling of a torrent of swear words into the script. In the past, we’ve heard this audience yelp consternation when a single profanity has issued from the mouth of Judi Dench or Colin Firth but they were stymied here. They could hardly object when the shits and fucks were integral to George VI’s speech therapy.
The King’s Speech isn’t an exciting film or, sometimes, even an interesting one. But it’s grimmer and more self-disciplined than I expected. It has wide audience appeal. I imagine that royalists will see what they want to see and regard all publicity as good publicity. The curious and less easily satisfied will get (a bit) more than they bargained for. Tom Hooper deserves credit for keeping pomp and pomposity to a minimum for as long as possible. Even in the climactic speech at the outbreak of war in 1939, the director is prepared to cut away to the King’s speech therapist Lionel Logue mouthing the F word (as a reminder about the technique he’s taught his patient to keep the words coming). The music playing during this sequence, however, is by Beethoven rather than Alexandre Desplat (who, elsewhere, has supplied another supportive, unremarkable score). It’s the same music – the last movement of the eighth symphony – that was used in the recent trailer for Of Gods and Men (though, oddly, not in the picture itself) and its effect is powerfully elevating. From this point on, the film moves to the predictable triumphant ending you expected, and which Hooper is unable or unwilling to resist. I think he also makes a mistake – is too easy on the audience – in not showing Bertie’s disastrous public speaking debut as Duke of York, closing the Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, in its gruelling entirety. This crucial sequence – which could have induced not just sympathy but shock – is poorly judged in other respects too. There are pointless ugly close-ups of the BBC announcer (Adrian Scarborough) preparing to speak. The Wembley crowd, discreetly embarrassed for Bertie, needs to look more baffled by what they’re hearing (or not hearing).
David Seidler’s screenplay is serviceable but includes some rudimentary expository passages and leaden jokes. There are several ‘key’ scenes which are so crudely placed or staged that the temptation to voice your own flow of expletives is strong. When Bertie leaves his first session with Logue telling him it’ll be the last, the therapist gives him as a souvenir a recording of the speaking test they’ve done – Bertie reading Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech with Handel’s ‘Messiah’ played at high volume so that he can’t hear his voice as he reads. We know what the recording will reveal (Logue has even told Bertie how good he was) but Hooper and Seidler move from this into George V’s 1934 Christmas broadcast etc. Cut to Bertie lying on a couch at home late one evening. Irritated by the record on the gramophone, he changes it for Logue’s recording. As he listens, astounded, to the revelation of his own fluency, his wife appears at the door, tremulous with hope. The scene would be a stinker anyway but it’s very poorly staged: does Bertie want to make himself more depressed (Colin Firth gives no indication of this); if not, why does he play the recording? It’s as if Hooper decided he needed a five-minute (in screen time) interval between the recording being made and being heard – and it doesn’t matter how the interval is filled. This blunder also makes you feel insulted on behalf of Helena Bonham Carter, who’s already convinced us how resiliently positive-thinking the Duchess of York is. This woman would have wanted to hear the recording as soon as they got back from the appointment with Logue.
The sequence in which the therapist gets to the bottom of Bertie’s stammer – a punitive nanny had a lot to do with it – isn’t conceptually any better than the familiar screen moment when a psychiatrist unearths the single childhood trauma that explains all the patient’s problems. In effect, though, this has a spark of originality, if you assume that psychotherapy was terra incognita to the British royal family eighty years ago. The exchange between Bertie and Logue as they walk in one of the royal parks on a misty, frosty morning looks lovely but is an example too of Tom Hooper’s unease about the action becoming too static. He seems anxious to get people on the move whenever possible – but this conversation surely wasn’t a good one to choose: would Bertie have chosen a public place to dismiss Logue (in a loud voice)? At the pair’s rehearsal for the coronation in Westminster Abbey, there’s a clumsily written outburst from the King about Logue’s lack of medical qualifications and Hooper has the two actors take some false, stagy positions. (It’s possible that this is intended to pick up the theatrical nature of the setting – Bertie-George and Logue move on and around a dais where the coronation chair is placed – but, if it is, that doesn’t come over clearly enough.) Hooper needn’t have worried about the film’s lack of movement. When Bertie is sitting in Logue’s consulting rooms, the sense of claustrophobia and helplessness is strong. The rooms are large but rather empty, tenebrous, and with oddly painted walls (courtesy of Logue’s children): Bertie doesn’t want to be there but where else can he go?
There are lots of dark-toned interiors – once or twice the effect is just muddy but the rationed light is cumulatively expressive. It not only anticipates the Gathering Storm; it suggests a society benighted in its dismal constraints of social position and hierarchy, and it shuts out nostalgia. Bertie, imprisoned by his stammer, epitomises the plight of his boxed-in family and the class – even, by extension, the whole society – to which he belongs. (He yields to being amiable with Logue only occasionally.) This sounds dull but what enlivens The King’s Speech is that it takes an ordinary situation – being in a job you hate (and dreading a promotion) – and concentrates on an extraordinary example of it. (Early on in the film, the Duchess of York explains to Logue that her husband isn’t in a job he can change. When Edward VIII proves otherwise, it makes it all the more impossible for his brother to follow suit.) The scene in which Logue (revealed to be a failed actor) auditions unsuccessfully for an amateur drama group in Putney is far from subtle but it fuses and endorses what the film has to say about being undone by public speaking and the British caste system of the time. To Logue’s surprise and humiliation, the audition panel spots an Australian accent. (David Bamber, as the panel chair, delivers the news with vicious snobbish zest.)
Colin Firth is a more imposing (borderline portly) figure than the real George VI and he looks a bit old for the part – certainly older than Guy Pearce’s David/Edward, who was Bertie’s elder by a year. (Firth is fifty; the film covers George VI’s life from the ages of twenty-nine to forty-four.) But as soon as I read about this film, more than a year ago, I thought Firth would win an Oscar for it. Royalty and disability is a potent combination, and since Firth was widely assumed to be runner-up for last year’s Best Actor Oscar it seems all the more likely that he’ll win – with his (overrated) performance in A Single Man fresh in the minds of Academy voters. He has one great, moving moment when, at home with his wife shortly after the abdication and terrified by what’s in prospect for him, Bertie breaks down – simply and completely. Firth is occasionally funny, too. Watching newsreel of Hitler in oratorical action, one of the young princesses asks, ‘What’s that man saying?’ Her father replies, wryly envious, ‘I don’t know but he seems to be saying it rather well’. Otherwise, Firth plays conscientiously and is likeable but doesn’t do anything here to change my view that he’s a limited actor. As in A Single Man, he keeps you constantly aware of the character’s state of mind. He does that by externalising that state of mind in his movement and, especially, his face – as Bertie, he wears a mask of impacted misery, except in private with his wife and children. The best actors can show the audience what’s going on inside their characters while keeping this hidden from people they meet on the screen. But Firth’s inability to do this works in The King’s Speech: it’s because no one asks what the matter is or tells him to cheer up that we get a sense of how little anyone is bothering to look at the man. The Duke of York and, as it turns out, future king has a public role to play – it almost doesn’t matter who he is as an individual. (This serves as a reminder too of the relative lack of media scrutiny of the period, compared with now.)
Firth also draws on his own locked-in quality as an actor here. When Logue has him doing physical exercises to loosen up, Bertie doesn’t relax because Firth looks to be trying and failing to be floppy yet the effect is touching. He has a good connection with Helena Bonham Carter and he’s charming in the scenes with the two children. Ramona Marquez plays Margaret Rose and this striking, self-aware little girl (from Outnumbered and the Enid Blyton TV film in 2009, which also starred Bonham Carter) really takes the camera. As Princess Elizabeth, Freya Wilson is less noticeable most of the time but this pays off in the moment she comes to the fore. It’s another very affecting moment: after the abdication, this sober child and her father lock eyes, aware of what this means for both of them. Geoffrey Rush, a fine actor (different class from Colin Firth), is subtle and charming as Lionel Logue, balancing humour and reserve: we watch Logue taking things in but often keeping them there. Rush’s face has grown almost comically elongated over the years but he has an eccentric dignity too. His expert timing makes more than one of the indifferent jokes in the script funny. Helena Bonham Carter is physically nothing like the young Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon but that’s no bad thing, especially when Firth is more physically solid than his original. Bonham Carter’s quick, witty speech and movement suggest a flapper who’s had to grow up fast, and she doesn’t overdo the young queen’s passionate loyalty to her husband. (Her stylish, deft presence makes a nonsense of Wallis Simpson’s dismissive description of Bertie’s wife as ‘the fat Scotch cook’, which Hooper and Seidler clearly felt was just too good to omit.)
The cast includes a few of my least favourite actors, including Anthony Andrews and Jennifer Ehle; I write this with regret but Derek Jacobi is well on the way to joining that group. As Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Jacobi is deadly – tiresomely theatrical, working his beautiful voice for a jocosely satirical effect. To be fair, he’s ill-served by the script (Lang is regally dismissed with his tail between his legs twice in quick succession in the Westminster Abbey coronation rehearsals – it’s like a bad comedy sketch) – but Jacobi’s presence in The King’s Speech is a sad reminder of the distant glory of his own performance as a stammerer in the BBC I Claudius in 1976. Andrews, as Stanley Baldwin, is, of course, clueless and Ehle plays the small part of Logue’s wife as if she were visiting royalty: she slows things down each time she appears. (She looks much more like Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon than does Bonham Carter, however: it’s a relief Ehle wasn’t in the larger role.) With the honourable exception of Rush, the actors playing commoners do less well than those doing the royals. Timothy Spall puts on a silly voice as Churchill (who appears to replace Chamberlain the moment the war starts) and there are no surprises in Eve Best’s Mrs Simpson. By contrast, Claire Bloom gives Queen Mary a distinctive air of practised, peevish authority and Michael Gambon has an astounding bit as the dying George V: bewildered, he barely knows who or where he is but still knows that he gives orders to people. It’s hard to stifle a yawn when the abdication crisis arrives – not so much because it’s badly done as because it’s par for the course. The writing here is particularly uninspired but Guy Pearce, as Edward, has an edgy, nasty charisma.
9 January 2011
